The term nation-building should be applied to a very deep intervention in a country
of the sort that we can do really when we are in control. You go in, you defeat
an army, you conquer a country; there is no government except you. Now you have to
engage in nation-building. The other example would be a place that
essentially had no government, like Afghanistan, where in those ungoverned
spaces, terrorists can grow and ultimately threaten the United States so
the president makes a decision: "this is going to be costly, but it is more costly to
leave it alone." The goal of nation-building when we do it is I think to change
significantly another country's political structures and it requires the
ability to make lots of changes. Every piece of the infrastructure, every piece
of the economic system, every piece of the political and military system, comes
under your control.
It's a very big task.
The question of nation-building for the United States is directly tied to the
rise of the United States as a world power. It worked pretty well in the cases
of both Germany and Japan at the end of World War II and they very quickly,
within about five years, became real democracies. In both of those cases we
had a lot to build on: Germany for example had been a democracy at the end of
World War I. Both countries were very advanced industrially. We weren't
creating, we were rebuilding - and that's a lot easier.
The Korean War starts in 1950 and ultimately we win South Korea; we have had troops in
South Korea since 1950 and we kept having to intervene, not militarily but
politically. It's a true democracy now, but for many years it was a military
dictatorship, so it really took a long time. In Vietnam, of course, we ultimately
failed in nation-building. The North Vietnamese took over South Vietnam and established
the communist government that is there still. Once we were attacked on September
11th 2001, we kind of backed into nation-building in Afghanistan and we
went in there for one reason: al Qaeda was headquartered in Afghanistan and we
were gonna go after them. We then went into Iraq in 2003. Most people would say those
were two unsuccessful experiments with nation-building.
Neither one is now really a democracy. One of the problems we have here is
we're Americans: we say, "now we have to build a democracy." Why a democracy? Because we're
Americans, that's what we believe in - and we kind of edge into this nation-building
almost without preparing for it.
I don't think nation building is a very popular concept in the United States
because people think it means very expensive interventions elsewhere -
expensive in money, expensive in blood. But there are going to be cases where there is a
widespread view that we should intervene. There may be humanitarian cases where
government is so vicious and genocidal that there will be a widespread
international view that "look, something has to be done here!" One of the things
we've learned about nation-building from Afghanistan and Iraq is that we may not
have the expertise to do it in a number of cases. There are a lot of countries
around the world that have the resources to help us do this. One of the
difficulties we run into is that it usually follows a military intervention,
but it's not primarily a military activity. We haven't quite mastered the
segue. There are a lot of negative consequences when we intervene someplace
and it doesn't turn out well. The next time we are contemplating doing
something we may say "no" when the right answer would have been "yes". There has
been a lot of discussion in the U.S. government about: how we do this better? What kinds
of expertise or what kinds of capabilities do we need? So I think this
is gonna be a perennial question.